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The Deor we know from scholarship is a poem comprising episodes, isolated 'examples' illustrating the 'moral ... that when adversity comes we are to endure it, taking what small comfort we can from the thought that it will eventually pass'.1 This article, however, will argue that a relative wealth of Germanic analogues allows us to see the legendary episodes not as various stories partly obscured by time, but as points in a well-known, sequential narrative history. In order to understand why this possibility has been overlooked, however, it will be useful to understand how and why the history of Deor scholarship has offered a very different story. In his edition of the poem, Kemp Malone declares that 'Each section is complete and self-sufficient, capable of standing alone as an independent poem.'2 P. J. Frankis informs us, 'Of course, the five episodes do not make up any continuous or systematic allegory: each section points to an isolated aspect of human relationships and misfortune.'3 Norman E. Eliason assigns numbers to the separate episodes, arguing that the refrain that ends each section 'link[s] them together thematically but also set[s] them off as structurally independent'.4 Eliason even dismisses the connection between the first two sections: 'Although the first two examples the poet cites refer to a common story (the Weland legend), he presents them as two distinct instances of misfortune.'5 These early impressions of unrelated episodes have remained through the decades since: Alfred Bammesberger argues that 'the genitive of the demonstrative se in the a-halfline [of the refrain] refers back to the misfortune mentioned in the immediately preceding lines' so that the episodes are linked only by their analogical relationship to the first-person narrator.6 Juan Camilo Conde Silvestre compares the use of Germanic allusion in Deor with that in the Old English translation of Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy, inferring that such varied exempla - 'better known to the intended audience' than to modern scholars - suggest the Deor poet may have drawn on the Boethius.7 Renée Trilling reads Deor as a 'constellation' of 'individual examples of suffering' drawn from 'otherwise unconnected moments in the Germanic past'.8 While the sections on Weland and Beadohild are 'well-known', those in the next three sections feature 'more obscure moments from the Germanic tradition'...